Fiction

SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO

LIONEL SHRIVER

Borough, 266pp, £18.99

Lionel Shriver, a writer of strong opinions, known for her pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown journalism, once again challenges our views in this novel about a suicide pact. Kay and Cyril Wilkinson have witnessed the slow dementia of Kay’s father. When they turn 80 they plan to take back control and drink of the hemlock to spare themselves, their children and the NHS the burden of their old age. ‘That’s when the fun starts,’ said Louise R Brown in the Spectator.

David Grylls in the Sunday Times agreed. He enjoyed the ‘mingling of comedy and horror’, as Shriver ‘gleefully’ constructs 12 possible outcomes of the central situation. ‘Through the potent spell of Shriver’s language, horror gets alchemised into amusement. Fiery phrases spit and crackle. Disgust expands and bursts into belly laughs.’

Alex Preston in the FT enjoyed its unconventionality too: ‘there’s something bracing about reading a novelist so admirably heartless, watching her pull the legs off her characters … her books are fun, smart and … unlike anything else you’ll read’. He described it as a novel of ‘riotous, occasionally bilious satire that asks how long we want to live and how we wish to die’.

But Walter Kirn in the found comfort: ‘It’s about marriage. The persistence of relationships. For whatever direction the Wilkinsons’ lives take, or